My sporting brother and the armoury - I attend him on his shooting
expeditions - Adventure with golden plover - A morning after wild duck -
Our punishment - I learn to shoot - My first gun - My first wild duck - My
ducking tactics - My gun's infirmities - Duck-shooting with a
blunderbuss - Ammunition runs out - An adventure with rosy-bill duck -
Coarse gunpowder and home-made shot - The war danger comes our way - We
prepare to defend the house - The danger over and my brother leaves
home
CHAPTER XXII
BOYHOOD'S END
The book - The Saladero, or killing-grounds, and their smell - Walls
built of bullocks' skulls - A pestilential city - River water and Aljibe
water - Days of lassitude - Novel scenes - Home again - Typhus - My first
day out - Birthday reflections - What I asked of life - A boy's mind - A
brother's resolution - End of our thousand and one nights - A reading
spell - My boyhood ends in disaster
CHAPTER XXIII
A DARKENED LIFE
A severe illness - Case pronounced hopeless - How it affected me -
Religious doubts and a mind distressed - Lawless thoughts - Conversation
with an old gaucho about religion - George Combe and the desire for
immortality
CHAPTER XXIV
LOSS AND GAIN
The soul's loneliness - My mother and her death - A mother's love for
her son - Her character - Anecdotes - A mystery and a revelation - The
autumnal migration of birds - Moonlight vigils - My absent brother's
return - He introduces me to Darwin's works - A new philosophy of life -
Conclusion
CHAPTER I
EARLIEST MEMORIES
Preamble - The house where I was born - The singular Ombu tree - A tree
without a name - The plain - The ghost of a murdered slave - Our
playmate, the old sheep-dog - A first riding-lesson - The cattle: an
evening scene - My mother - Captain Scott - The hermit and his awful
penance.
It was never my intention to write an autobiography. Since I took to
writing in my middle years I have, from time to time, related some
incident of my boyhood, and these are contained in various chapters in
_The Naturalist in La Plata, Birds and Man, Adventures among Birds,_
and other works, also in two or three magazine articles: all this
material would have been kept back if I had contemplated such a book
as this. When my friends have asked me in recent years why I did not
write a history of my early life on the pampas, my answer was that I
had already told all that was worth telling in these books. And I
really believed it was so; for when a person endeavours to recall his
early life in its entirety he finds it is not possible: he is like
one who ascends a hill to survey the prospect before him on a day of
heavy cloud and shadow, who sees at a distance, now here, now there,
some feature in the landscape - hill or wood or tower or spire - touched
and made conspicuous by a transitory sunbeam while all else remains in
obscurity. The scenes, people, events we are able by an effort to call
up do not present themselves in order; there is no order, no sequence
or regular progression - nothing, in fact, but isolated spots or
patches, brightly illumined and vividly seen, in the midst of a wide
shrouded mental landscape.
